Moonfruit

{{Infobox company

| name = Moonfruit Limited

| logo =

| type = Private company

| key_people =

| industry = Web hosting service

| products = Web services

| parent = Yell (company)

| subsid = SiteMaker Software Limited

| foundation = 1999

| location = London, England, UK

| homepage = {{URL|http://www.moonfruit.com/}}

}}

Moonfruit was a UK-based company that offered a website building service.

History

Moonfruit was launched in January 2000 during the dot-com bubble, and was supported entirely by advertisements.{{cite news| url = https://www.theguardian.com/Archive/Article/0,4273,3952468,00.html| title = Will the moon bear fruit?

| work=The Guardian| location=London| date=2000-01-20| accessdate=2010-05-13}}

When the bubble burst, it became a subscription-based service.{{cite web|title=Digest|url=http://econsultancy.com/nma-archive/53630-digest-1574|accessdate=16 February 2014|date=9 August 2001}} Later, the company was bought out by its London-based staff.{{Cite web |url=http://www.smarta.com/blog/2011/3/qa-wendy-tan-white-moonfruit/ |title=Q&A: Wendy Tan-White, Moonfruit |last=Rebecca |date=March 3, 2011 |publisher=Smarta Enterprises Ltd |access-date=16 February 2014}} The service is now in its sixth version, including a French language version, with further languages to follow.{{citation needed|date=December 2021}} In April 2011, over 3.5 million websites had been built using Moonfruit's point-and-click interface and drag-and-drop templates.{{cite web|last=The Startups Team|title=Moonfruit: Wendy Tan White|url=http://startups.co.uk/moonfruit-wendy-tan-white/|work=startups.co.uk|publisher=TECH START-UPS|accessdate=16 February 2014|date=Apr 4, 2011}} By the end of 2011 over 4.4 million were created with another 1.2 million in 2012, bringing the total to 5.66 million websites by the end of 2012.{{cite web|title=Moonfruit Retrospective 2012|url=http://www.moonfruit.com/blog/post/2013/01/30/Moonfruit-2012-Retrospective|accessdate=16 February 2014}}

SiteMaker is a reseller of domain registrar Gandi so SiteMaker customers can register domains for their sites, in return Gandi offers SiteMaker as an option to its customers in addition to its own website builder.{{Cite web|url=http://www.moonfruit.com/partners|title=Partners {{!}} Moonfruit|website=www.moonfruit.com|access-date=2016-10-08}}{{Cite web|url=https://wiki.gandi.net/en/contacts/reseller|title=Resellers — Welcome to Gandi's Online Documentation Wiki — Gandi Docs|website=wiki.gandi.net|access-date=2016-10-08}}

Turnover reached $1.9m in 2009, before shooting up to nearly $4m in 2010,{{cite web | url=http://startups.co.uk/moonfruit-wendy-tan-white/ | title=Moonfruit: Wendy Tan White | publisher=Startups.co.uk | work=Growing Business | date=April 4, 2011 | accessdate=January 18, 2015}} with its SiteMaker subsidiary making a loss of £1.26m in 2011.

On 16 May 2012, Yell (the British Yellow Pages publisher) acquired Moonfruit in a deal worth £23 million.

{{cite web | url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/windfall-for-founder-as-yell-buys-moonfruit-7758159.html | title=Yell acquires Moonfruit | publisher=Yell | date=16 May 2012}}

In 2013 Moonfruit's Flash-based platform was adapted to render sites in the HTML 5 format to enable website presentation on devices not supporting Flash, such as iPhones and iPads.{{cite news| url=https://www.moonfruit.com/blog/post/2012/10/05/HTML5-Update-roll-out-plan |title=HTML 5 Roll-out Plan | date=20 December 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130606155830/https://www.moonfruit.com/blog/post/2012/10/05/HTML5-Update-roll-out-plan |archive-date=6 June 2013 |url-status=dead}} The HTML 5 rendering engine continues to be improved with new features and improvements including e-commerce, blog page and social platform integration. Moonfruit user created websites that are facilitated by the new build of Moonfruit can be viewed at the non-affiliated Moonfruit Directory.{{cite web| url=http://themoonfruitdirectory.com/#/moonfruit-directory/4584234353 |title=The Moonfruit Directory | date=18 November 2014}}

On 8 August 2016 Moonfruit announced that they would cease to offer free websites. The owners of free Moonfruit websites could upgrade to a paid subscription, failing which their websites would be deleted after 90 days.{{Citation needed|date=August 2020}}

In 2021, Moonfruit announced that the platform will be decommissioned on 7 December 2021.{{Cite web|url=http://help.moonfruit.com/en/articles/5402791-uk-paying-customer-migration-faqs|title = UK Paying Customer Migration - FAQs}}

Twitter

In June 2009 Moonfruit began a promotional campaign using Twitter. In celebration of their 10th birthday, they offered Twitter users the chance to win an Apple MacBook Pro by tweeting their tag, "#moonfruit". One MacBook would be given away each day for 10 days to a random participant who had used the tag. This campaign was successful enough to keep the #moonfruit tag at the top of the trending topics for an entire week and garnered some media attention.{{cite web

| url = http://mashable.com/2009/07/01/moonfruit-macbook/

| title = Twitter Promotion Done Right: #moonfruit

| website = Mashable

| date = July 2009

| archiveurl = https://web.archive.org/web/20090704085639/http://mashable.com/2009/07/01/moonfruit-macbook/

| url-status = live

| archivedate = 2009-07-04

}}

{{cite web

| url = https://techcrunch.com/2009/07/04/why-is-moonfruit-trending-on-twitter-its-the-rebirth-of-a-startup/

| title = Why is #moonfruit trending on Twitter? It's the rebirth of a startup

}}